Advance Excel Export

The Advance Excel Export plug-in enables Appian applications to generate secure, multi-sheet Excel workbooks directly from one or more SQL queries. It supports business processes that require offline review, collaboration, approvals, audits, or bulk data updates by allowing only designated columns to remain editable while protecting the rest of the workbook. The plug-in helps organizations securely exchange structured data with external users, maintain data integrity, simplify reporting, and streamline Excel-based workflows by automatically creating, formatting, protecting, and storing Excel documents as Appian Documents.

Key Features Include:

• Multi-sheet Excel export: Runs multiple SQL queries in one call up to 20 each writing to its own sheet in a single Excel file.
• Column-level protection: The chosen columns (matched case-insensitively across all sheets) stay editable; everything else, including all headers, is locked.
• Structural lock-down: Blocks row and column insertion and deletion on every sheet.
• Configurable formatting: Custom Excel number formats for DATE and TIMESTAMP columns (defaults dd-mm-yyyy and dd-mm-yyyy hh:mm:ss) and a configurable header fill color for locked columns.
• Optional password protection: The whole file can be encrypted with a password that is required to open it.
• Streaming write: Results are streamed into the file with flat memory usage, tested to 50,000 rows.
• Overwrite semantics: If a document with the same name already exists in the target folder, it is replaced by the new file.
• Safe error handling: Technical failure details go to the server log only; the process receives a generic error message and an exception.

Renamed from "Excel Export" to "Protected Excel Export" (new smart-service key: protectedExcelExport).

New Functionality:

Sheet-scoped editable columns: use sheetName:columnName syntax to unlock a column on one specific sheet, in addition to existing global (all-sheets) matching. Validation added to catch unknown sheet names referenced in editableColumns.

Behavior Changes:

ExcelPassword is now required. It no longer encrypts the file for opening — the file always opens freely. It now sets the password required to remove sheet protection (Review > Unprotect Sheet). Column width is now calculated dynamically from header text length instead of using a fixed width. BIT/BOOLEAN columns now render as native Excel TRUE/FALSE cells instead of "Yes"/"No" text. Added a 100,000-row-per-sheet cap; excess rows are dropped with a warning instead of failing the export.

Bug Fixes:

Fixed incorrect date/time format casing that caused minutes to display in place of the month (dd-mm-yyyy → dd-MM-yyyy).

Validation & Security:

Added explicit checks for missing/blank jndiName, targetFolder, and NewDocumentName. SQL validation hardened: strips comments before checking, and rejects UNION clauses and nested subqueries. JDBC connection now set to read-only as defense-in-depth. Updated commons-compress to 1.26.1, resolving CVE-2024-25710 and CVE-2024-26308.